Technology Reviews and Podcasts

Intel Kills the Best CPU that They Sold

Intel recently announced that they were killing off their Pentium G4560 3.5GHz CPU. This CPU was recently released with the Kaby Lake CPUs like the i7 7700k and so on. So what’s wrong with it?

Absolutely nothing.

According to Intel the only reason they moved to kill the G4560 was that it was cannibalizing i3 CPU sales. That’s it. Intel has a winner CPU but they’d rather sell you an i3 for more money.

This is another decision in a list of decisions Intel has made recently that has left me questioning who is really running Intel. Obviously it’s not enthusiasts so it must be the bean counters. And this continually seems to be the problem with Intel. They are more concerned about their bottom line than having people excited about their product.

AMD has people so excited about their new products that they’ve clawed back 10% market share recently. And that is still with a processing architecture that’s not quite as efficient as Intel’s seventh generation core design. AMD is coming back because it has an enthusiastic core of people excited about their products.

Intel instead has released their most convoluted chipset and CPU combination ever with the X299 LGA2066 blah blah blah. There’s so much wrong with this platform I honestly have no interest in even outlining it here. There’s tons of places to look up information on that topic and I’ll leave you to that after finishing this story.

Back to the G4560. It did technically compete with Intel’s i3 chips though at a lower clock rate. The G4560 featured hyper-threading so it had two cores and four threads like an i3. For $85 CAD its a lot of CPU. You can even sorta game on the thing though really four-cores is the way to go nowadays. But Intel doesn’t want you buying it. The equivalent i3 is nearly twice the price.

Will we see the G4560 rebranded as an i3? It’s possible but pretty unlikely. It’s interesting to me that a generation back Intel was more than happy to sell you the Pentium G3258 that while not hyper-threaded it was overclockable. They’ve moved that privilege to the i3 as well with it’s very own i3 7350k CPU.

In a market where AMD is a very real threat especially on the value front it’s hard to believe that Intel would remove a highly competitive product like the G4560 from the market to sell you a more expensive one. If you were on the fence waiting for a Ryzen R3 CPU or APU or buying a G4560 your decision has been made for you.

I know Dan will have some comments on this as well. Bring it on, buddy!